This Brilliant Dance
by painfulclarity
Summary: JS and DM. Sam's last week at the office how she ties up her various loves and friendships and departs for a new life. Part three posted.
1. Monday

* * *

This is a five-part fic that will likely be finished and posted within the week. It's Jack/Sam and Danny/Martin, through Sam's POV. Set about eighteen months after the start of season three. I don't own the characters and so on. Feedback would be very much appreciated. 

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* * *

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**This Brilliant Dance**

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_(So this is odd,  
the painful realization that has all gone wrong.  
And nobody cares at all,  
and nobody cares at all.)_

* * *

Sam keeps the job transfer close to her chest to begin with, like a particularly good hand of cards that she wants to bluff with and then finally lay out on the table with a triumphant flourish. She knows about the transfer's finality for six weeks before it actually happens, and manages to keep it a secret from the rest of the office for five of those six until Jack bursts out of his office waving a sheet of paper and saying, "Sam, what the hell is _this_?" 

She looks up from her computer, notices what he's waving around, and blinks for a second, trying to compose herself. Finally, "I don't know. I can't see it from here."

He goes slightly red and advances towards her. "You _know_ what this is, Samantha. Why didn't you tell us about your transfer?"

Danny, who as far as Sam can tell, has been pretending to ignore them and smirking, which he's very good at, shoots his head up. "Samantha, you're transferring?"

"I, uh," she begins lamely. The combination of Danny's dark, slightly wounded gaze and Jack bearing down on her like an angel of doom is not a good one. She settles for a definite, "Well. Yeah."

Danny stands up quickly and strides over to Sam's desk, perching on the edge of it. "Seriously? When're you going?"

She's grateful for the distraction from Jack's steady glare and shrugs. "A week. I have to be in Florida next Monday."

"Florida?" Jack sputters for a second. "Florida. You've got to be goddamn _kidding_ me. We only just lost Martin, and now you're going too?"

She opens her mouth but no words come out. Luckily Danny rescues her with a quick, "Wait, I thought he went back to Seattle."

"He _did_," Jack grunts, and turns around, beginning to head back to his office, shaking his head. Halfway there, he turns around, throws a quick glance at Sam, looks as if he's about to say something, but doesn't manage to force the words out.

He slams his office door with a resounding thud and beside her Danny mutters, "Hey, I think you just broke his stony cold heart."

"Just like you broke Martin's, then," she reacts coolly, bitingly, shuffling some papers on her desk with shaking fingers.

Danny makes a faint noise of denial and then spits out a quick "Whatever," before returning abruptly to his desk.

There is no sound in the office for about ten minutes, except Danny slamming files violently around and typing furiously; carefully, Sam builds up a little glass box around herself. Detach yourself, she tells herself, and for a little while it's easy to imagine leaving. That is, until Viv and Martin's-replacement-Rob come bursting back in and the box shatters and for a brief moment she feels very, very alone.

* * *

At lunchtime, Sam's about to leave as quickly as she can before she gets targeted by either Jack or Martin's-replacement-Rob, who's been asking her out since the day he arrived. At least Martin had the courtesy to leave it a few weeks, she's been thinking somewhat resentfully and bitterly, but she doesn't actually say it aloud. She went out with him once but it just resulted in forty-five minutes of martinis and no conversation before she made an excuse and left. It didn't work. She thinks that maybe she's been trying to fit every guy into the same mould, the prototype which would have worked in every way except it wasn't the right time. 

She hates Jack, sometimes. Hates how she keeps matching every guy up to his shadow and none of them are ever good enough. Hates that he can't have been that great, anyway; and she doesn't think he was. Hopes, _wishes_, that he was, because if he wasn't, then she really has been dumb to waste all this time thinking about him.

So she grabs her jacket quickly and is about to slip quietly out of the door to a nearby sandwich bar when she hears Viv's voice ring out commandingly behind her. "Samantha! Wait for a second. I'll come with you. Let me just grab my purse."

Sam curses inside as she turns and pastes a welcoming smile onto her face. "Sure."

Viv rejoins her in a few moments, and they stand in silence as they wait for the elevator. Sam can't help but glance sideways a couple of times, but the other woman's face is blank, impassive. Sam wishes she could do such a good poker face, but she has the habit of letting her emotions get the better of her. She's not as bad as Danny, or as bad as Martin was, even, but she's definitely been known to let the cases get to her a little too much. It's the small-town girl ones that always tend to do it. It's easy to see herself in their clear, innocent faces.

Making a little smalltalk and speculating about the case, they make their way to a small sandwich bar on the corner. Sam picks a chicken salad sandwich and fresh orange juice, and queues behind Viv. She doesn't want to stay there and _talk_, but her hopes of making an escape back to the office are dashed when Viv says, very firmly, "We'll eat in," to the cashier.

Feeling martyred and with a cold sensation of dread in her stomach, she follows Viv over to a small table in the corner of the window. She's facing the glass and she can see hordes of people walking past outside, all thoroughly self-absorbed in their own business, their own lives.

She thinks it must be nice, to not have to interfere in anyone else's private business. Over the last few months she's begun to develop a great distaste for rummaging through people's personal lives, the things they want to keep under lock and key.

God knows, she'd hate it if someone did it to her.

Viv takes a purposeful sip of her coffee.

"Espresso good?" Sam asks half-heartedly.

"It's a cappuccino," Viv tells her. "And it's a little heavy on the foam but other than that it's pretty good."

"Great." Sam begins to pour her orange juice into a plastic cup. It's healthy; she's trying not to drink too much caffeine at the moment. She needs more vitamins, or something. And anyway, it tastes good.

"So, you're leaving." Viv looks vaguely reproachful as she carefully unpacks her sandwich from its plastic box.

Sam shrugs, shoulders awkward and graceless. "I guess I am."

"Any particular reason?"

And Sam's totally lost. There were once a million reasons, but for the life of her she's forgotten them all. "The city," she finally manages to force out. "The property's not too hot. Rent's up at the moment."

"So you're moving to Florida?" Viv raises an eyebrow. "Try Brooklyn. Or Queens. Danny lives in Queens, he likes it."

"Good for _Danny_. And anyway, he only likes living there because he's a block away from his favourite queer bar." And she doesn't mean to sound either bitchy or sarcastic, but it just comes out that way. Viv's lips narrow. "I guess I just want to get away from here, you know?" she tries feebly after an uncomfortable pause.

Viv takes a bite of her lunch, drawing a piece of basil leaf into her mouth with the practised ease of one who is used to eating exceedingly messy sandwiches. After she chews and swallows, she says, "I guess you'd have cause to."

"What?"

"It must be hard being around Jack." And the expression in Viv's eyes is horribly matter-of-fact and _knowing_.

Sam takes a deep breath. "Yeah," she admits in a rush. "Yeah, it is. And it was hard being around Martin and now it's not great being around Danny, and as for Rob, who likes him, anyway?"

"If he wasn't an agent I'd take him for a pervert," Viv says lightly, and then pauses. "Well, he could be, anyway."

Sam lets out a startled, relieved laugh. "Exactly. I mean, after I refuse to go out with him for the eighth time he could finally get the message, you know?"

"I know! He's almost as bad as Martin was," Viv says, drawing the conversation smoothly back onto topic.

Damn, Sam's glad that Viv isn't interrogating her. She'd break in a second.

"Yeah," she agrees. "Except I actually liked Martin."

"Past tense?"

"Mmhm," Sam agrees. "Past tense. I couldn't screw the same guy as Danny and keep a straight face."

"_Straight_ face," Viv points out, and chuckles lightly. "You know, Jack told me that when he first heard about your transfer he thought you were going to join Martin."

"He's goddamn paranoid then," Sam says flatly. "I don't understand why people keep thinking that." She bounces exasperatedly off Viv's gaze, and continues, "I mean, yeah, we went out, but for god's sake, it wasn't eternal love. It'd be great to see him again but as friends. I think we work better that way."

"It would've been good if he'd never left," Viv muses. "I think the whole team worked better that way."

And it's true. Martin fit in a way that Rob probably never will. Despite the whole silver-spoon thing, Sam thinks that he somehow managed to make himself fit in by trying desperately and finally proving himself. Rob just tags after Danny in an awestruck, envious kind of way; Sam wants to break his illusions and tell him that Danny's a fag.

She gets the impression that Rob wouldn't like him quite so much after that. She thinks that Rob's probably an asshole like that.

"You're right," Sam agrees belatedly, and takes a bite of her sandwich. It tastes slightly stale in her mouth, and she realises she isn't hungry anymore; maybe she wasn't to begin with. So she finishes her orange juice, and then smiles weakly. "Think we better head back now?"

"Sure." Viv stacks her serviette and empty plate carefully onto a tray. "Let's go."

They walk silently back to the office, but this time it's more of a companionable silence. When they get out of the elevator Sam begins to walk back towards the office, but Viv lays a hand on her arm. "Samantha."

"Yeah?"

"We'll miss you round here." A genuine smile.

"Yeah." And for some reason Sam finds herself blinking away tears. "I'll miss you too."

Viv squeezes her arm briefly, and then she's walking away. Sam has to lean on the wall to collect her thoughts for a moment. Then she takes a deep breath, applies a fresh layer of lipgloss, and re-enters the office.

* * *

Martin calls her that night, voice crackly and distorted. They talk for a few minutes about banal, everyday things – Martin asks if Jack cut his hair yet, Sam says of course he isn't, what is he, human? And Martin asks if she knows how Reggie is, and Sam says he's doing good, and that Viv told her that his team won the state basketball championships. And then there's an awkward silence before Martin asks how Danny is. 

Sam smiles into the receiver. She's used to being in between the two guys; most mornings Danny looks away and asks, painstakingly casually, if she's heard from Martin lately at all, and every time Martin calls he always checks out Danny's situation.

"Single," Sam says, voice laden with insinuation.

A crackly pause. "That wasn't what I meant!"

"Don't lie to me, Martin," Sam replies laughingly. "He's completely single and he misses you."

Another staticky pause. "He does?"

"Almost as much as you miss him."

"I never said that."

"You didn't have to."

"I guess not," Martin admits slowly. Sam hears him sigh. "I miss all of you."

"We miss you too. Viv just said to me today that Rob'll never replace you."

"He better not!" A laugh, which Sam's thankful for. "He's a slimy son of a bitch, isn't he?"

"Almost as slimy as you," she says lightly.

"Thanks a lot!" Martin uses a lot of exclamation marks, she observes.

"I'm just kidding," she says in a pacifying voice. "You know he doesn't match up to you. He's more of a rookie than you ever were. He's not cut out for this job. He's too soft."

"_I_ wasn't cut out for the job," Martin points out, his distorted voice sounding almost mournful.

"You know that wasn't the only reason you went to Seattle," Sam tells him. There had been a lot of talk about Martin having a nervous breakdown unless he got out of the city. She hopes that he's doing okay now, but can't quite find the words to ask.

"I guess not," Martin says ruefully. "The team here isn't half as efficient, y'know, I keep thinking I'm back in New York and barking orders at everyone and they're all just like, chill out, man. It's weird."

"I'm sure you'll cope."

"Yeah. So am I."

"So you're… happy, now."

"I miss you all but yeah, I guess I am. I'm happy." Martin sounds like he's trying out the words for the first time. "Yeah. I'm happy."

"I'm glad."

"Thanks. So, what's going on down your end?"

Sam pauses. "Did I tell you I got a transfer?"

"You're kidding! Of course you didn't tell me. Where to?"

"Florida."

"Really? That was where Danny grew up. Hialeah, I think."

She laughs. "Martin, I think you have an obsession."

"I haven't seen him in months, of course I haven't." He sounds oddly defensive.

"Yeah, and you're talking about where he grew up."

A sigh, setting off the static again. "Alright. I gotta go. Just… tell him I said hi, okay?"

"I will do."

"Okay. Take care, Sam."

"I'll do that as well. Same to you, Martin."

And then Martin hangs up the phone, and Sam sits staring into space at the receiver for a few moments before she shakes herself and places it back into its cradle.

* * *

TBC. 


	2. Tuesday

Thanks to all who left me feedback on the last part - very much appreciated! Concrit is also welcome. I don't own the characters, the italicised lyrics belong to Dashboard Confessional, and this part contains somewhat but not really smutty J/S.

* * *

**This Brilliant Dance**

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_(So you buried all your lover's clothes  
and burned the letters lover wrote,  
but it doesn't make it any better.  
Does it make it any better?  
And the plaster dented from your fist  
in the hall where you had your first kiss  
reminds you that the memories will fade_.)

* * *

The next day at work is surprisingly normal. They're looking for a woman, name of Sarah Hawes, who went missing late Sunday night. Prime suspect's her stalker ex-boyfriend, but she has some very suspicious emails and instant-messenger logs saved on her computer. From the start Sam thinks, _this is _not_ going to work out_, and when they discover her body in the trunk of an abandoned car, trussed up in thick silver tape with a red ribbon tied around her mouth, she has to stop herself from shouting _I told you so!_

Jack steps back from the car, sighing in his normal disgruntled-bear way. "This job, I'll tell you," he mutters, half to himself. "It's goddamn infuriating."

"I know." Sam takes a step closer to him, places a hand gently on his shoulder. She doesn't know why she's doing it, only remembers that she's leaving late Friday and that she's going to miss him very much. "I know."

He doesn't look at her, only raises his own hand to place it on hers. His fingers are warm and dry and while the touch only lasts for a matter of seconds, she feels a jet of electricity run through her body.

They walk back to the car, and she waits for him to call Danny back at the office to tell him that they found a body, her head tilted back against the seat rest as she cranes her neck to watch him. Talking fast, an air of authority about him as if he knows exactly what to say and do.

She watches him drive back and thinks, God, I could have really loved this guy.

* * *

Back at the office, Danny corners her by the water-cooler, his eyes narrowed. He's a lot taller than her and could be pretty intimidating-looking, if she didn't know that he'd never hurt her in a million years.

"Samantha, I—" he begins, and then exhales frustratedly. "Jesus, I don't even know what to say." He's staring right down into her face in that invading-of-personal-space thing he's always got going on, his dark eyes conflicted and wide.

She steps quickly out of his shadow. "Martin called me last night."

And he seems to suddenly melt, metaphorical water trickling down his sides and pooling around his ankles. "He did? How is he?"

"He's good." She nods. "Says he's happy."

"Happy?" Sam thinks that maybe she's imagining the flicker of disappointment in Danny's eyes, but maybe she isn't. "He said he's happy," he repeats. "I guess that's good." He hovers for another moment, obviously desperate to ask more questions but driven by pride to remain silent.

Guys, Sam thinks, can be _so stupid_ sometimes. She decides to put him out of his misery. "He asked about you. Asked how you were."

"What'd you say?" Danny leaps on this like a starving dog being thrown a bone.

Sam smirks. "I said you were single—"

"Bitch," Danny curses.

"—and that you missed him," she continues, truthfully.

Danny looks as if he at once wants to smother her in kisses and rip her limb from limb. He settles for a safe middle, and says, "Why did you _say_ that?" in a pained voice.

"'Cause you do." Sam beams blandly up at him.

Danny makes a spluttering noise. "I do not! Since when did I ever say that, I — what'd he say?"

"That he misses you too," Sam tells him gently. Then she smiles and walks back to her desk.

Danny looks slightly stricken.

* * *

Later that day, Sam gets paired with Rob to meet the parents at the morgue to get a positive ID on the body. He lets her drive – always a mistake – and to spite him she nearly crashes a total of five times. By the time they reach the morgue he's white and trembling.

She smiles a little when she sees his legs shaking as they walk towards the morgue entrance.

It's not that he's not good-looking, because he is. He's tall and he has shaggy blonde hair and bronzed skin and looks nothing like an FBI agent. In fact he looks as if he just strolled in from a long day's surfing and tried on his dad's suit for kicks.

Not funny, she wants to tell him. Not funny at all.

Because there's something honest about the way Martin and Danny and Jack look after a long, hard case – pale and haggard and battered, like ghouls. There's a kind of unity in the way the team all stagger to get coffee together when a case is over and they haven't slept in three days and their hair's greasy and they have huge, dark shadows around their eyes.

The people at the coffee shop call them the zombie crew.

It's amusing, sort of. At least it used to amuse Sam when they were crammed around a too-small table, all smelling slightly and talking about anything other than the case, like Viv's son and Jack's daughters and how Martin's apartment smelt of dry rot and he was getting kind of worried and how exactly Danny managed to get laid so often. And Sam can't remember what she told everyone else, but it seemed to make them smile, at the time.

She has to stop thinking of Martin as part of the team. It probably isn't healthy.

Then again, in three days she won't be part of the team, either. That's even less healthy.

She shakes all those thoughts from her mind and follows Rob into the building.

It's a quick, positive ID. Well, not _positive_ – how IDing your daughter's body could be positive, Sam doesn't know – but it's her, the missing woman, the one they've been looking for. And now, she figures, it's case closed.

She gets back to the car and Rob climbs in the driver's side, saying hurriedly, "My turn to drive on the way back."

_My turn to drive_, like they're bickering kids trying to decide who gets to drive home from the beach or something. Get the hell back to the beach and out of my sight, she wants to holler at him, but somehow restrains herself.

They drive back to the office in total silence; if Rob tries to make a comment, Sam either gives him a one-word answer or glares at him as if he's completely insane. Finally Rob draws to a halt outside the office and says plaintively, "I don't know if I've done something wrong…"

Sam leans right into his face and says, "If you don't shut the goddamn hell up, I swear I'm going to kill you."

He freezes for a second and then relaxes, laughing uncomfortably. "Sam, baby, you drive me wild. How about a drink tonight?"

Sam breathes very deeply and, with great self-control, does not shoot him.

She does, however, slap him. Then she leans in as he's touching his cheek very tentatively and looking surprised, and hisses, "Next time I'll kill you. If you ever call me Sam again I swear to God I'll kill you. No one goddamn calls me Sam."

"_Jack_ calls you Sam," Rob protests, and Sam thinks, to hell with it.

"I let him call me Sam because," she says haughtily, "I love him. I do _not_ love you. I don't even like you. In fact, I hate you. In fact, if you were a worm I'd grind you into the sidewalk with my heel. In fact, I wish I could do that anyway."

She slams out of the car and walks into the building. It's not until she gets into the elevator that she thinks with some belated shock, _Shit, I just threatened to kill a colleague. And then I hit him. And then I told him that I love Jack._

_Wait._

_I love Jack?_

She debates banging her head against the elevator door, but decides against it.

* * *

When Rob enters a few minutes later, there's a large red handprint emblazoned across his cheek. This comes as a surprise to all but Sam, who calmly continues to type. He makes his way into Jack's office, where they have a loud conversation that no one else can hear because of clever soundproofing, but Rob doesn't seem to realise that the walls are made of glass. He points and gestures at Sam a lot. Once she waves back, but he doesn't appear to notice.

Jack sits there, his hands steepled on his desk, nodding in a mature way while Rob dances with fury.

(God, Sam hates him.)

Finally the conversation draws to a close. Jack shows Rob out, and he flounces across to what used to be Martin's desk, and sits down at the desk chair. Jack returns to his office without a glance at Sam. Ten minutes later he comes out again and places a small slip of paper silently onto her desk. It reads:

_Sam,_

_Rob told me what happened. He wanted me to give you an official warning. I figure, you could pretend this is it. You're not getting a real one. That guy's a lech – props for hitting him. Wish I could've done it myself. That's a great shiner._

_You should talk to me later. We have to catch up before you leave._

_Love,_

_Jack_

Sam thinks, maybe she'll keep the note with her love letters from high school.

* * *

Sam figures that maybe she's gone a little crazy since she got her transfer. Because when Jack asks her to go out with him after work, she accepts.

He looks sort of surprised, but beams widely at her. Sam doesn't think she's seen him smile like that in a pretty long time.

So she meets him after work, just by the elevator, and they leave together. And maybe it could be a coincidence, they could plead their cases pretty well, but she's totally happy that it isn't. They go to a small restaurant a block away that they always used to go to way back when, and when they step inside, Sam says dryly, "Boy, this brings back old memories."

Jack cocks an eyebrow at her coolly. "Good or bad thing?"

"Both," she decides, allowing her lips to flicker in a brief smile. "They're good memories, though. I guess."

She doesn't expect Jack to say, "Yeah. They are," and grab her hand, but he does anyway, and leads her to a table. She loves holding his hand, feels treasured and safe, her small fingers inside his big man's hand. The skin on his palms smooth with calluses and his fingerprints probably disappeared because he likes to work with his hands, working wood into new and unimaginable shapes. Sam loves that.

When the time comes to order, they've been too busy talking and looking at each other to have decided on food; but Jack takes charge, saying, "I'll have the ravioli, and Sam, you always used to like the carbonara. That okay?"

And of course she nods, because Jack's the only person she ever took orders from, anyway, and she feels safe under his command. When the waiter's gone, she muses, "It feels like old times."

Jack pauses before agreeing, a slow nod as he flattens out his napkin.

Gently, she runs her fingers over the back of his hand, unknotting his fist and smoothing his fingers out. "Except, no wedding band," she says absently, trailing her fingernail down the length of his ring finger.

"No," he agrees, sounding as if his breath's catching in his throat, and she smirks. He catches her eyes, narrows his own, and takes a sip of his red wine.

She follows his cue, lifts her glass to her lips. It's a fairly decent dry white, not that she's a wine expert exactly but she drank a whole load of cheap shitty wine in high school when all she and her friends wanted to do was get drunk as quickly as possible. And this wine's definitely better than that four-dollar-a-bottle crap. Takes the glass away from her mouth, returns it to the little crescent it made in the tablecloth. Wipes away a smear of lipstick around the rim.

Sam can feel Jack watching her lips, her eyes, the way her hair curls softly around her shoulders, looking at the triangle of bare skin at her neck, the dark shadow that hints at her breasts, and she smiles.

* * *

It's not that Jack's bad in bed, because he's not. _Definitely_ not, Sam thinks when she bites back a gasp of near-ecstasy as Jack does something unintelligibly wonderful with his tongue and she digs her fingernails into the bed sheets. And it's not that he's worse than Martin, because he's not. Martin was strangely useless in bed, a weird combination of total desperation to please and utter inability to actually do so.

(She thinks that probably he was more used to having sex with guys, but she never asked him. She's always been tactful like that. Of course, that isn't a matter of tact so much as 'eww, too much information', because while she doesn't care if Martin chooses to have sex with women, men or mountain gorillas, she doesn't particularly want to know about it.)

(Although while he was still in New York she considered maybe sneaking into his apartment and videotaping him and Danny because they were both not just hot but _hot_, and—okay, it was a mistake to even think it. She admits that now.)

Anyway, he isn't bad in bed. Not at all. But at the same time there's always this weird sense of urgency, as if he has to get it over with quickly, and it always is over quickly, for both of them. It's fast and red-hot and passionate, and Sam always ends up with certain parts of her body bruised to hell, and sometimes it's even a little painful to walk afterwards. But it's a good pain, almost as good as the purplish mark on her neck that she'll have to cover with turtlenecks for a few days.

Jack totally just—

And then all thoughts are dragged forcibly from her mind because, oh Jesus, he's inside her and – fuck, fuck, _fuck­ _– and she's got no time to bite back her cries this time, and when she comes it's not meek and mild and reticent like it was with Martin but it's a tidal wave, washing over her until she forgets how to breathe and speak and live, and if she dies and goes to heaven right now she probably won't notice.

All too soon it's over and Jack's rolling off her. She stares at the ceiling and tries to get her breath back as he rustles around the room – his room, now, not hers like it always was, she hasn't been here before – and then she hears a hissed, "_Shit_," from the corner of the room.

"What?" She sits up, holding the sheets protectively around her.

"It goddamn broke, that's what." Jack waves the offending rubber at her, and then slams it into a bin.

All of a sudden she's too tired to process the information. "What—what do you mean?"

"I _mean_ that the last time this happened to me it resulted in my daughter Hanna," Jack snaps out acidly. He sits down heavily on the corner of his bed and Sam is reminded all over again that _right_, he's got a daughter and she's, what, nearly eleven now, and he's a lot older than her, and shit, what just happened?

She carefully doesn't tell him what happened to her the last time the rubber broke and says, instead, "It'll be okay."

He moans quietly into his hands and says, "God_damn_it, you're leaving on Monday."

"Friday night," she points out very quietly.

"Friday night, of course," he spits out through gritted teeth. "What if – what if something happens and you're all the way over in goddamn _Florida_?"

"Do you have any STDs?" Sam asks in a very matter-of-fact voice.

Jack looks as if he's about to explode.

"Okay, bad question," she says hastily. "Just… this stuff happens every day. Don't worry about it. I'll get the morning-after pill, it's all cool."

She can feel a sickening lurch of dread in her stomach despite her words. Suddenly she's catapulted back into a cold December night at the age of eighteen and she has to take a deep breath to calm herself down. "It'll be okay," she tells Jack again, feebly.

He nods. "Yeah. Yeah, okay." Then he lets out a snort of laughter. "Dammit, I'm forty-two. This shouldn't be happening anymore."

"That's what you get for messing around with younger women," she suggests lightly.

Jack shakes his head ruefully, and glances up at her. Then he shifts further towards her, reaching out to take her hand. "Hey, Sam."

"Yeah?"

"We could've been good."

"I know," she agrees, telling herself very strictly not to say anything she might regret at some other point. She makes herself smile. "We still have three days to make it good," she tells him.

"Three days," he agrees. "We can be great in three days."

Then he kisses her again.

* * *

TBC.


	3. Wednesday

Thanks for all the lovely feedback on the last two chapters - hopefully you'll like this one, too. :D Insert a standard disclaimer here.

* * *

**This Brilliant Dance**

_(So this is strange,  
our sidestepping has come to be a brilliant dance  
where nobody leads at all,  
where nobody leads at all.)_

* * *

She wakes up at three forty-two the next morning and tosses and turns until four-oh-eight, when she thinks with some irritation, _Screw it, I'm leaving_. There are things she needs to take care of, chemists she needs to visit, needs to get home for a fresh change of clothes.

So she gets up as carefully as possible, levering herself up from Jack's bed with as much silent ease as being an agent ever taught her. He mutters in his sleep, moves slightly, but she holds her breath for a second and he falls still again.

Quickly and quietly, she dresses, debates whether or not to wear the same underwear as yesterday. Decides to go without but reminds herself to cross her legs on the train, especially as she elected not to wear her crumpled pantyhose. Unless she wants to be viewed as a hooker, and she really hates when that happens.

She catches the subway home. It's only a few stops, but it's still dark enough for her to feel slightly intimidated. Keeping a tight hold on her handbag, but she always does that – she figures that she's a city girl at heart, she holds her purse tight under her arm with the clasp at the front where she can see it. She hasn't got her briefcase today – anyway, she feels like a fraud carrying a briefcase, like a little kid dressing up in her mother's clothes.

Not that her mother ever had a briefcase, or anything.

By half past eight, she's been home and gone out again. She's decided to pull her hair back in a formal, severe-looking ponytail. Apparently there's something about long, flowing curls that makes men want to have sex with women, and she doesn't want men to think that about her today, for some reason. Not when her inner thighs are sore, not when she has to choose a high-necked shirt to cover the hickies.

She also spent ten minutes staring into the mirror on her dresser and pulling at her skin; she can feel it beginning to lose its elasticity, can feel jowls beginning to form either side of her chin. Can see flakes of eye makeup seeping into the wrinkles around her eyes.

Before work, she goes to a chemist and, unobtrusively, asks for the morning-after pill. She receives a little white packet and is told that she has to take it within forty-eight hours or it won't work. Outside the shop, she draws the packet out from its small paper bag; she stares at it for a moment and then, with a flourish, flings it into a garbage can.

She supposes that it will be nice to have something to remember Jack by, when she gets to Florida.

* * *

When she gets into the office, ten minutes late because she accidentally started talking to the doorman for the first time in five years, Danny beckons her over to his desk.

"Go out with me tonight," he says quickly.

Sam blinks. "Uh, okay."

Danny rolls his eyes. "Not as a _date_—"

"Obviously," she says dryly.

"_Obviously_," he agrees, and then smiles. "Go out with me tonight."

She pauses for a second, but can think of no reason why not. For a moment she remembers Jack's dark eyes and how he said that they could be great in three days, and how she's leaving the day after tomorrow, but she shakes those thoughts from her mind. "Sure," she answers lightly.

Danny beams.

* * *

Rob avoids her for the whole of the day. The red mark on his cheek has disappeared, but Sam figures that he probably won't forget it. She's glad. She hopes he won't. She hopes that one day some other girl will hit him harder. She doesn't know why she hates him so much.

Something about his goddamn _face_.

Jack assigns her to work with Rob and Danny, much to her chagrin, because they have to interview an entire department of people at an accountancy firm, where the missing person invested all his money and promptly disappeared two days afterwards. Jack thinks there's probably something crooked going on there; Sam agrees with him. Of course, she mostly agrees with him, these days.

Danny drives them, Rob getting antsy in the back seat because his manhood's being stamped on, probably. Sam thinks he has an inferiority complex. She thinks he probably has a dick the size of a pea, and makes a mental note to tell Danny that later. He'll appreciate the joke; Viv would probably stare at her for a second, and Jack would look at her as if she's mad, and Martin would be shocked, but Danny'll laugh.

She sits next to Danny in the front, and after a quiet few minutes of driving, she says, "How's Will?"

He shoots a glance sideways at her and says, "I wouldn't know. You know I broke up with him a while back."

In the back seat, Rob says, "_What_?"

Sam looks sideways at Danny, who's raising an eyebrow at her and smirking slightly. He knows exactly what she's done and she knows that he doesn't mind. She twists round in her seat and says vaguely, "Danny broke up with his boyfriend Will a while back," to clarify the situation.

Rob's mouth is hanging open. "You – you go out with _guys_?" he asks.

"Yes," Danny returns blandly. "So?"

"Nothing," Rob stammers, and cringes back into his seat as if Danny's about to leap on him and attempt to have wild tempestuous sex with him. Sam rather doubts that this is about to happen, especially as Danny's attempting to manoeuvre the car through a particularly tricky intersection. Also, Rob isn't his type.

Sometimes she wonders that she knows things like that.

There's an awkward silence.

Finally Danny breaks it by saying, "I called Martin last night."

Sam glances quickly sideways. His face is expressionless, but there's a kind of twist around his lips that suggests he's trying to hide a smile.

"Oh yeah? What'd you guys talk about?"

"Stuff." Danny cocks his head minutely at Rob. "I'll tell you later."

"You better," Sam tells him severely, and reaches across to squeeze his shoulder.

* * *

Back in the office, Sam thinks that maybe Jack's ignoring her.

Because he's walked past her desk four times, and not once in those four times has he actually said anything to her. Or looked at her, for that matter. And he _never_ ignores her – he didn't ignore her the day after he broke up with her for the first time. He said hi, and then bent down to say sorry yet again in a hoarse whisper.

Today, however, he appears to be pretending that she doesn't even exist.

She tells herself that if that's the way he wants to deal with stuff, it's his prerogative, and it's certainly not her problem.

Still, though, she can't help being slightly hurt. She's sick of being hurt by Jack, she realises suddenly, sick and tired of how he picks her up and discards her again, and all the fake promises he's made her over the years, such as 'we could be great in three days', and he's not even talking to her.

Of course, there's the little voice in the back of her head that's saying, Yeah, but you walked out on him this morning, didn't you, but she ignores it.

All of a sudden she regrets throwing away the little packet that she got from the chemist's.

* * *

When she goes out with Danny, he takes her to a small bar that's only a ten-minute walk away from the office. She's sure that she's walked down that street a million times before, but she'd never thought of entering that particular bar before; when she tells him this, he smirks and tells her that she's been missing out.

He's right, she discovers. It's a nice bar, with a good atmosphere, and Danny appears to know the bartender because their drinks arrive in record time. Sam gets a weird blue cocktail that tastes of drain cleaner, not that she's ever tasted drain cleaner but it tastes the way she imagines it would do, and Danny stares into his sparkling water with a slightly rueful expression.

"Tell me," she begins, when they're both settled on green velvet barstools, "what Martin said to you last night."

Danny stirs the lime around his glass with a straw. The ice cubes clank against the sides of the glass as he smirks to himself. "Not much," he says lightly.

Sam shoots him a Look. "Taylor, you can't tell me you talked to Martin and clam up right after that. Did you—did you fight, did you talk?"

"We talked," he confirms. And his face turns suddenly closed in, and wistful. "I didn't realise," he says carefully, "how empty the office is without him. It's just that goddamn Rob and come on, like he could ever replace Martin."

"I hate Rob," Sam agrees with some vehemence.

"I _know_ you do," Danny says fervently. "And now you made him hate me. Go you."

She can tell he's joking, sort of, but looks shamefaced anyway. "You didn't mind that I said that, did you?"

He shrugs. "Don't really care, to be honest. I don't want to be all buddy-buddy with people who think the way I choose to live my life is sick. Although," he allows himself a smile, "it _was_ kind of fun having him run round after me half the time."

"Also annoying?"

"Yes," he confirms, "also annoying."

"Martin still liking Seattle?" she queries.

"Yeah," Danny says, face brightening, "he says it's great. He's got a whole bunch of old friends who live there, from when he used to work there, and he says he liked seeing them all again."

"Isn't Seattle where his ex-fiancée lives?" And Sam wishes she could bite the words back but Danny merely shrugs again, trailing one finger around the rim of his glass.

"Yeah, Caroline lives there. With her husband and baby," Danny adds, and Sam can see that he's trying not to smile. "Anyway, it's not like Fitzy would want her back. It was him that split up with her in the first place, he told me."

Sam frowns. "He told me it was the other way round."

"Yeah, he told people that so he wouldn't have to tell them why he broke up with her."

"And that was…?"

"Because he likes guys." Danny shrugs. "Martin's weird. He knows what he wants but he never lets himself take it." Pause, and then a reflective tone of voice. "He wants to be… _normal_."

"Normal's not your thing?" Sam asks.

Danny's lips curl upwards. "Normal was never my thing."

She knows exactly what he means.

* * *

Three hours later, and she's more than a little drunk. Well, not drunk, more overly happy and talkative, and her moods are swinging from happy to depressed to time-to-slit-her-wrists, back to deliriously happy.

So yeah, maybe drunk's a good word.

Danny's staring at her with a half-amused, half-terrified expression on his face. She figures that it might have something to do with the five empty wineglasses at her elbow, but she's not entirely sure.

"So the reason," she says loudly, "that Martin went out with me was that he wanted to be normal."

Danny looks uncomfortable. "Possibly, yeah."

She squints suspiciously into space for a moment. "Fine," she says then, "Fine. There are _some_ guys that go out with me for reasons other than, because they want to be normal. Like Keller. Remember Keller?"

"How could I forget," says Danny dryly.

"And Jack." Sam twirls the stem of her glass between her thumb and forefinger idly. She can see Danny watching it warily, and shoots him an annoyed glance. "I won't drop it."

"Never thought you would do," he says smoothly, in that humouring-people way that he has sometimes, like, oh, she probably drank more than she can handle so I have to be ultra nice to her, or something.

He's smiling at her benignly, kindly, so she decides to shatter his illusions and says lazily, "You know, I spent the night with Jack last night."

He nods. "Yeah, I thought something like that might have happened."

She jabs at his chest. "You're too perceptive." And she can still speak, words only a little garbled, and she's impressed with herself.

"Am I?" he asks, still smiling.

"Yeah." She sighs and drops her head into her hands. "Oh God, it was such a mistake."

Danny sniggers slightly and says, "Oh yeah? Why?"

It's probably too much information to say, "Because the condom broke," but she says it anyway.

Danny's expression changes from amused to somewhat nauseated. Sam thinks that probably her answer wasn't what he was expecting. She can't blame him. "Okay," he says. "Wow, that was too much information."

"Sorry," Sam laughs, feeling sort of as if she's floating.

"So, uh," says Danny, looking deeply uncomfortable, as if he feels like a dad giving her The Talk. "What'd you do about it?"

She shrugs, and nearly falls off her stool. After she's collected herself, she says, "Not much."

He frowns slightly. "What do you mean, not much?"

"I _mean_, not much!" She sighs. "Well, I bought the morning after pill."

"Good," Danny says, sounding slightly reassured.

"Didn't take it, though." She makes a face, and says, "Oops!" dryly.

Danny looks aghast, and in a way she's kind of enjoying leading him on, stringing him along. She likes to be unpredictable, sometimes. Most of the time she likes to think that she can be depended on, but unpredictability can be fun, too. "Oh my God, Sam," he says in a strangled-sounding voice.

"I know!" she laughs, a slight edge of hysteria to her voice. "Jesus, I have no idea what the hell's gonna happen to me in Florida."

He looks away for a second, and then glances back at her, his lips pressed in a straight line. "What part are you going to, anyway?"

"Miami." She wiggles her eyebrows impressively.

He nods. "Alright, great. I'm sure you'll have a great time there."

"Me too," she agrees, and for a second she almost believes herself.


	4. Thursday

**AN: **I'm so sorry about the massive delay. Schoolwork's killing me. Anyway, many thanks to feedbackers from before. Hopefully this chapter will be okay. Don't own the characters. Lyrics by Dashboard Confessional.

**

* * *

**

**This Brilliant Dance**

(_And the picture frames are facing down  
and the ringing from this empty sound  
is deafening and keeping you from sleep.  
And breathing is a foreign task  
and thinking's just too much to ask  
and you're measuring your minutes by a clock that's blinking eights._)

* * *

The next morning she wakes up and thinks, Oh, shit. Oh, holy shit.

She's lying in bed wearing the same shirt and pants as the day before, her head feels as if it's about to crack open, and she can hear someone rustling around in the next room. Also, her mouth tastes like dead cat, not that she's ever tasted dead cat but it's how she'd imagine one to taste, and whoa, too much thinking makes hungover Sam an unhappy girl.

"Uhh," she moans faintly, staring at the ceiling. Too much light; she's forced to close her eyes again.

"Morning, sunshine," says a revoltingly cheery voice from the doorway.

"Fuck off, Taylor," she groans, right before she feels a weight on her bed just next to her feet.

"Yeah," he says, "I figured you might be a little hungover."

"Not hungover. Dying," she corrects him. "And what's up with you? Why are you so happy?" Sam decides through a haze of pain that she hates happy people. Especially happy Danny.

"I'm always happy," he tells her.

"No, you're not," she argues.

"True," he agrees. "However, I have painkillers."

Her eyes fly open and she begins to sit up just before a wave of nausea breaks over her. She lies back down again with a whine of pain. "Feed them to me," she commands.

Danny sets a glass of water onto her bedside table and presses two tablets into her hand. "They're not miracle-workers but they'll do," he tells her.

"Thanks," she says, before swallowing the tablets dry and then taking a draught of water. "Why'd you get me so drunk last night?"

He snorts with laughter and holds his hands up as if she's pointing her gun at him. "Don't look at me. It was all your own work."

"I know." She makes a face and slowly levers her legs out of bed. "You put me to bed, Taylor?"

"It was a close call," he tells her. "After you barfed on my shoes in the elevator I figured I might just leave you on your doorstop."

She cringes slightly. "I threw up over you?"

"Over my shoes," he corrects her. "And I didn't like them much anyway."

"Good." She makes an attempt to stand up, feels her head spin, and sits heavily back down again.

Danny eyes her warily. "Will you be okay to go into work today?"

"Second to last day. I have to."

"I guess." He chews the inside of his cheek for a second. "You don't mind that I slept on your couch, right?"

"Why should I? You didn't take off my shirt. Definite advantage to going out with gay guys," she says, with a half smile. She figures that if Rob had taken her home, he probably would have taken off her shirt in the pretence of getting her in a suitable state to sleep. Hell, even Martin probably would have, although he definitely wouldn't have done it in a sick sort of way.

She wonders if Jack would have. Somehow, she doesn't think so.

* * *

One way or another, she manages to get into work with Danny by half past nine, her stomach churning unpleasantly with the revolting-looking but surprisingly good-tasting fried breakfast he forced down her. She's wearing a shirt and pants that don't match in any way, shape or form, and he's wearing the same, now rather wrinkled, suit as yesterday, with slightly stained shoes.

Viv raises an eyebrow at Sam questioningly as they walk in.

She tries to maintain a blank expression, partly because her head is still pounding and actually doing anything would probably make her pass out, but mostly because she can see Jack sitting in his office and glaring out at her with steely dark eyes and she's afraid she's about to trip over something, such as her own feet.

Sam sits down at her desk and turns on her computer. The bright white screen's too light, making her head hurt even more. For a moment, she considers slipping her sunglasses on but she doesn't, because she hates being a cliché, and she's seen a whole bunch of movies where agents walk around wearing dark glasses even in the wintertime.

She is _so _not a cliché.

Although, as she gazes at Jack's thin-lipped profile, she thinks that maybe she's been a cliché all along, except everyone was too well meaning to tell her.

She wishes they had. God, she wishes they had.

* * *

For some reason, Jack pairs himself with her that day (sadism, obviously), and they go to visit the missing guy's wife together. It's over in Queens, and the drive takes thirty-five minutes on the way out. Jack taps his fingers irritatedly on the steering wheel, and Sam hates that she can't take her eyes off him. She still feels an occasional residual flicker of guilt at the thought of leaving his apartment first thing yesterday morning, but tries to shake it off.

It wasn't right, it would never have worked. There was never even a chance of it, not really. Not when she's leaving- holy shit, she's leaving _tomorrow _- and he's so much older than her, and when every time he touches her she aches for him to touch her again. It's easier to just break away, she tries to reason with herself.

Yet for some reason, she really doesn't want to.

She frowns out of the window until they arrive at the house. The interview that they carry out is brief and terse, with her and Jack asking alternate questions almost as if they're conducting separate conversations, and she figures that maybe they are.

In the car on the way back, they get caught in traffic; Jack slams the heel of his hand on the horn exasperatedly, and this is one thing his FBI badge can't get him out of. It's strange; every time she looks at him, she can't help but remember other times, years ago, nights ago, and it's making her feel sad, and quiet, and slightly ill with grief for something that died, and that she never even knew was there to begin with.

They get caught in a huge hold-up, and Jack sinks back into his seat with a low growl of frustration; after a couple of minutes, he glances over at her once, twice, and then finally says, "So what was with yesterday morning?"

She's caught, doesn't know what to say, and settles for shrugging. "I'm sorry, I guess," and her voice sounds rusty.

"Uh huh." He accepts her apology with a slight bow of the head, and manoeuvres the car expertly into the next lane. "All right." And his tone's slightly sceptical.

She finds herself hissing with exasperation. "I _am_sorry," she insists, feeling her cheeks burn dark red.

"All _right_." A slight hint of irritation edging into his voice.

"Jack, for God's sake, don't make a big deal out of this," she says, too loud, full of a sad kind of desperation.

"Not make a big deal." His voice is flat, eyes staring forwards, and she can tell with a sinking feeling that he's definitely going to make a big deal. "Not make a goddamn _big deal_. Jesus Christ, Sam, how can I not make a big deal out of this?"

She cringes back slightly. "Jack, I'm leaving tomorrow. This isn't… it can't be… It isn't permanent," she settles for.

"No," he agrees. "It's not permanent, we said that. But we had three days and you threw one away, three goddamn precious days and I wanted those days. And now we only have two."

"Yes," she says softly, cutting him off. "And two days aren't very much."

"Why can't we just goddamn make the most of them," Jack says through gritted teeth. "Why can't we just—"

He breaks off in the middle of a sentence, and falls silent. "Jesus, what's the goddamn use," he says, sounding slightly desperate and forlorn, still staring forwards into the road as if he can't bring himself to look at her. "What's the goddamn use when you're going and there'll be nothing left in New York for me."

She sighs, says, "That's being sort of melodramatic."

He smiles, a twist of thin lips. "I wish it wasn't the truth."

She stays silent. Her throat's constricting painfully; she doesn't think she can say anything else. She doesn't think there's anything else that can be said.

* * *

When they get back into the office her head's pounding again, probably as a result of the enforced silence in the car, and the bitterness radiating off Jack's skin as he smouldered next to her. She wishes in a way that she hadn't left his apartment, but knows that it was the only thing that, realistically, she could have done. She figures that it's easiest to cut ties now, before she does something she might regret and gets _really _reattached to him.

(Not that she isn't remembering the way his lips moved across her skin and how his body felt on top of hers, because she is, and usually at the most inopportune times.)

"You okay?" Danny's voice shocks her slightly, and she shakes herself.

"Yeah, I'm good," she tells him belatedly.

He smirks, which is really no surprise. She's beginning to think his face is frozen that way. "Head still hurting?"

"Naturally it is," she says wearily. "You didn't clean your shoes properly. They still have puke on them."

"I didn't get time, because someone was demanding painkillers," he says lightly. "You and Jack okay?"

"No," she says bluntly.

"Ah." He looks uncomfortable, shifts from foot to foot. "I gotta go out right now, I have to bring a hooker in, but you guys, you need to—"

"I know," she says.

"I didn't finish —"

"I _know_," she repeats firmly. "Go get your hooker. I'll talk to him."

He narrows his eyes at her. "Sam, if you mess this up, it's gonna be me that hears about it for the next god-knows-how-long."

"I know that as well," she says, even though if she's completely honest she totally hasn't even begun to consider that.

"All right." Danny sighs, and for a moment he looks very, very tired. Then he slaps a smirk back onto his face. "Call Martin tonight for me, okay?"

"You need your fix?" And it's getting back onto a comfortable level, where she isn't worried that he's going to blow up at her or she's going to say something wrong and ultimately very hurtful.

"Worse than cocaine. Not that I'd know," and he raises his eyebrows at her before disappearing out of the door.

She looks over at Jack's office and accidentally meets his eyes. Quickly, she looks away, feeling herself heat up and go red, and then she berates herself because really, this isn't goddamn gradeschool. She's a grown woman and independent, like that stupid Destiny's Child song, and she never liked Beyonce anyway. She figures that maybe it's okay to blush sometimes. She's sick of being independent, all of a sudden, and a white picket fence with a golden retriever looks all too appealing.

She meets Jack's eyes again; he pointedly looks away from her, and she never liked dogs anyway.

* * *

"Martin Fitzgerald."

"It's me," she sighs.

"Samantha! Hey, how're you doing?" He sounds cheerful and upbeat, and she has to repress a shudder.

"I'm doing okay," she says slowly, because _I don't want to leave anymore and I might be pregnant with Jack's baby _seems sort of too fatalistic.

"Glad to hear it!"

"You're… using a lot of exclamation marks," she says suspiciously. "Did you talk to Danny?"

A pause. "How did you know that?"

"I'm psychic," she says mystically, and really, this is managing to cheer her up more than she was expecting.

"Whatever," he sniggers, and then says, "Danny told me about you and Jack," in what used to be his normal voice, but which now sounds uncharacteristically serious.

"Great," Sam says flatly, feeling something in her chest sink. "Danny didn't say he was going to call you. He told _me _to. What an ass."

"You're changing the subject," he warns her lightly. "You and Jack. Don't mess it up, Sam."

"Danny told me the same thing."

"Ever heard of mind-sharing? Yeah, it's fun…"

"Either that or he told you what to say."

"That, too," Martin confesses. "But from me, as well, Sam, don't mess stuff up. You're leaving tomorrow. Make it good before you go."

She can't find any words, and settles for allowing a quiet sob to slip from between her lips.

"Do that, okay, Sam? I didn't do that and I was always really pissed at myself about it."

"I'll make it good," she promises him, very quietly. "Okay. If you make it good with Danny," she adds, trying to regain a little control of the situation, at least.

There's a pause before Martin says, reflectively, "I think I already did."

* * *

She isn't sure exactly what time it is, but she figures it must be pretty late that she knocks on Jack's door. It swings open before she has a chance to run away, and she smiles apologetically at Jack as he gapes at her.

"You're here," he says, somewhat stupidly.

"You're such a great agent," she says teasingly, and takes a step towards him. "So perceptive."

"What're you doing here?" His voice a slight groan, and he moves away from her.

She stops, slightly hurt. "I just came by, I guess…"

He gazes at her for a moment, and finally drags his eyes away. "Oh God. You better come in."

"Enthusiastic," she remarks as she steps delicately past him towards the couch, halting just before she gets there.

"You can hardly blame me," he says grouchily. "We have such a great history."

"That's why I'm here."

"What, to end things once and for all?" His arms coming up to fold over his chest, strangely defensive as he cocks an eyebrow at her.

She feels her lips curl in a smile. "No. Well, I don't know. Maybe?"

"Get on with it, then." Looking past her head as if it's too hard to stare into her eyes.

"But they told me not to mess it up," she murmurs, taking another step towards him.

"Who?"

"Danny and Martin."

He smiles, despite himself. "Always thought they were good guys."

"Don't let me mess it up, Jack," she tells him suddenly, intensely, because she's burning up inside now. "Seriously. I'm leaving tomorrow, tomorrow, and there's so much left."

"I know," he agrees, taking hold of one of her hands, and this is security. "Would it be messing it up if you stayed the night?"

"I don't think so," she says shakily. "No. No."

"Thank god for that," he mutters as he clears those awful couple of metres between them, and there's this moment, this heartstopping moment when his lips are millimetres away from hers and they're staring at each other, and every nerve in her body is on fire as she feels his breath hot on her lips. Finally he kisses her and she can feel herself opening up, spreading herself open for him and she doesn't care about anything else suddenly. Thinks that maybe she _is_ a cliché, a stupid, blind, stubborn cliché, and she's so glad.

His lips so tender on hers, his hands warm on her back, fingers spread wide and she loves feeling small next to him, as if he can take care of her, and she doesn't thinks she could ever trust anyone else this much.

"I love you. All along, I loved you," he whispers as they pull away from each other, and she nods.

"I know," she says, voice almost breaking. "I think I always did."

She doesn't know if she's lying or not but it doesn't matter anymore. Because she'd give up so much for this one guy, and it's stupid, really, but she doesn't care. Doesn't care about much, anymore, it seems, and that's fine, perfectly fine, because she's drowning. And his arms are around her, holding her close, and screw her career and reputation because this is all she ever wanted.

* * *

TBC.


End file.
